Science

Except from a conversation with a rather vehement and objectionable catastrophist, who was asserting a consensus with AGW (anthropogenic global warming). I replied:

Incidentally, I agree with AGW. Specifically, in answer to the questions posed on the famous survey, that it has warmed in recent decades and that humans have contributed some non-zero amount to this. But…

Where you do not have a consensus is on CAGW, “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.” Many who understand the issues involved have noted that the small amount of warming recovering from the Little Ice Age has had and will continue to have beneficial effects, and that the continuation of this is extremely unlikely to be “catastrophic” and may even be a net positive. There is a reason that we have called past periods warmer than now “climate optimums.” And these same scientists have also noted that human contributions to the climate are evidently modest, and swamped by natural variabilities which are not well understood or reproduced in current climate models.

The link also discusses and demonstrates changes to the warm temperatures around 1940 to make them more in line with the notion of modern warming. And it also cites the discussions and plans by the core group of CAGW cheerleader scientists to “remove at least part of the 1940s blip” as they said, and later their conspiring together to get rid of the emails containing such discussions. I read with great sadness the Penn State “exoneration” of these folks, who merely accepted statements that they didn’t really delete the emails despite what they said. The Penn State panel performed no further investigation on the topic.

I have been watching this process and reading research papers on it since approximately 1970, and am utterly unimpressed with these cheerleaders and their government and academia protectors and enablers, and saddened by the politicization of science here. You and your like-minded comrades are doing to climate science exactly what creationists have incorrectly accused scientists of doing with regard to evolution, making that area of real science (which I have written about for four decades) harder to defend. Thousands of my discussion posts explaining evolution to creationists are still online, those dating back around two decades or so.

But now I have to contend with leftist distortions of climate science, to which young-Earth creationists can point and say “See? See? Look what they are doing!” To such accusations I must now, sadly, agree, while showing the distinction between science and propagandists like yourself.

The distinction here is that evolution has not been a subject of huge potential taxation and empowerment of governments. CAGW is. If you can propagandize enough, you can get people to agree that our lives must be run by leftist masterminds for our own good. We’ve seen this well along already.

Evolution has important implications in medicine, and is the foundation for many aspects of modern disease care. But it has not been the tool of a power-grab … the sort of power grab that you are now advocating, while trying to silence any evidence or any view that could interfere with it.

Two quotes of interest. One is from Robert Heinlein, an extraordinary writer and long considered the dean of science fiction, writing in 1939:

There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.

The other quote is from famous statistician Wm. Briggs in 2013, with the Heinlein quote specifically in mind and agreeing with it:

Tradition, collegiality, the big C (Consensus), and the big G (grants), ego, prestige, hope for promotion, boredom, politics, politics, politics drive science just as much or more than any passion for uncovering truth.

Both of these are good first-order approximations of the condition that now obtains in government-supported and government mandated climate science. And as I am involved heavily in “the big G” of government grants, the reality of that driving (and limiting and filtering) force is all too apparent.